I readily admit that when I started work on my first Draughts program I was a 'chess snob'. I thought that I could knock up a world class program in a matter of weeks because Draughts was after all "only a kids game". However I soon came to realise that there was much more to it than first meets the eye. What started as a few weeks work became a labour of love for about seven years!

Early versions performed well with Colossus winning the West of England Championship and the Computer Olympiad in 1990 (against the mighty Canadian 'Chinook' program).

The first commercially available version was called Colossus Draughts X and was released in a compilation pack of Colossus Chess, Draughts, Backgammon and Bridge (the only 'Colossus' title not written by myself) published by CDS Software.

Work continued on the program during the early 1990's during which period it achieved several match victories over strong human players including Irish Champion Con McCarrick and World Postal Champion Richard Fortman. I also collaborated with Jonathan Schaeffer on the Chinook program in its attempt to wrest the world title from Marion Tinsley.

In 1995 I released an updated version myself called Colossus '95 .

The idea of a Draughts database program was too good to turn down and thus 'DraughtsBase' and 'DraughtsBase 2' were both developed.

Literature

My interest in Draughts also extended beyond programming as I wrote several books about my program and the matches/tournaments it had played in and also several articles for various magazines/journals. Also I joined forces with George Miller and Gwyn Pritchard to launch the British Draughts Federation .

Finally I wrote a research paper investigating the shortest possible game of Draughts (available in Microsoft Word format).

I also have some scanned copies of older Draughts books available for download.